Thoughts Explained

I just wanted a space where I could write in a semi-academic fashion about topics that were bothersome or interesting. The scope of this writing will be within the topics of moral issues, science, skepticism or occasionally the sobering explanations of drunken tirades.

September 5, 2016

The Punishment Really
Shouldn’t Fit the Crime

What I’m here to write about is why retribution should be
completely eliminated as a goal of punishment. There are numerous goals and
functions of punishment and different societies, organizations and even families
use these goals often without the realization as to why the specific punishment
is being used.

A famous rehabilitated bike thief, but probably due to financial sucess

At the family level deterrence stands out as the main outcome, as “You won’t take that bike again!” seems like the desired outcome for some Canadian teens. When the problem seems to arise from being around specific people or places parents may try, another goal of punishment, incapacitation. ‘Uh-Oh’, ‘You’re grounded!’ might be the sound of incapacitation in action, but if your being grounded for breaking something, or stealing something you might unfortunately also hear, “And you’re going to get your brother a new bike!” This may be true even if your brothers bike was a rusty old banana seater that left you feeling like you’d have rather spent a night in prison after a couple of kilometers. This new bike is an added level of deterrence to be sure, but it has a more pointed goal of restitution or paying someone back for the harm you have done them.

If the problem keeps happening then parents can keep raising up the deterrence level through increasing the punishment for the undesired action, but at some point if stiffening the consequences isn’t working punishment needs a different goal, rehabilitation. This is where the behavior is tried to be changed in more constructive and intensive ways.

Those are 4 of the 5 goals of punishment, deterrence, incapacitation, restitution and rehabilitation, but underling and often answering how much or how long is retribution. If a bike was borrowed without asking the punishment should be greater than if a bike is stolen and not returned, or more generally small punishments for minor offenses and larger penalties for greater ones. Let the punishment fit the crime is the classic summation of retributive justice.

This leaves the five
goals of punishment as:

Deterrence – The use of punishment as an example to keep
people from committing a similar act.

Incapacitation – Removing the possibility of reoffending for
a period of time.

Restitution – The restoration of what was lost.

Retribution – Punishments are to be proportional to the
crime committed.

Rehabilitation – The changing of behavior patterns to
attempt to stop recidivism.

This makes it so one could imagine punishment on a
switchboard with five knobs corresponding with the five goals of punishment.
Each society or punishment giver has these knobs set at different levels, as
any decisions will began to toggle the dials in different directions. Strict
parents or states with strict laws unquestionably would have the deterrence,
incapacitation and retribution dials turned up while in easier going places
those three dials would be turned down.

The point here is that while these dials can be adjusted in
different ways, there are probably optimal settings for these dials in
different situations, but more to the point indicated in the title, there is
evidence that the retribution dial should be turned off completely if people
could move beyond the primitive need for proportional justice.

This evidence comes from studies on the modern understanding
of free will, which I like to call:

Two Unpopular and
Often Ignored Facts About the Brain:

1.1.Your brain makes decisions before your
consciously aware of them

2.2. Your brain lies to you

One: it has been known for quite a while at least since the
experiments the late of Benjamin Libet, who pioneered studies on actions and when people become conscious of
them. He had people hooked up with EEG electrodes and then asked them to do
simple tasks and log the time when they made
their choice. What Libet found was that through looking at the activity
recorded on the EEG machine he could know what the person was going to do
before the person themselves came to a conscious decision. This study was
similarly repeated a few years ago by scientists at the Max Planck Institute
and they found they could predict people’s behavior up to 7 seconds before theperson recorded conscious awareness. Meaning in the time it takes to become
aware of some decisions a person could have been 7/8ths of the way through a
bull ride. The implication here is that cognition is a process where the parts
of the brain make decisions and then people become consciously aware of them,
which creates problems for the idea of free will. Obviously some decisions are
made and acted upon in less of a span than 7 seconds, but the underlying
principle is what is the important take away.

Two: your brain lies to
you. It creates post hoc rationalizations on the fly to justify the decisions
that were made at the unconscious level. There are a few studies that stand out
as more important than other studies and really create a foundational
understanding, Zambano’s prison experiment and Milgrim’s work on obedience to authority, and Asch’s work on conformity. Those studies created a better
understanding of the mind and explained some of the mystery of human action and
Gazzaniga’s work with split brain patients should stand right along with them. Among
the many things his work demonstrates is the post hoc rationalization that the
brain preforms without our knowledge.

The corpus callosum is the
thin layer that connects the two halves of the brain, but as a last resort for
people with epilepsy this layer is cut, leaving the two halves of the brain
separate. This is interesting as the different halves of the brain have
different functions.

Importantly speech is located in the left hemisphere of
the brain and that can be exploited. A person can be shown something in their
left eye, which connects to the right side of the brain, and they will see that
image and have knowledge of that image, but it will be unknown to the side of
the brain that can verbalize that knowledge. If a split brain person is shown a
picture of a cat in there left eye they will say they didn’t see anything, but
when they are asked to guess at which picture they saw from a variety of
pictures they will pick the cat.

It only gets more
interesting from there, when both eyes are shown different pictures and a
person is asked to point at the image he saw, their two hands will each point
to a different picture. While that’s pretty neat what happens when the person
is asked why they are pointing to two different images, as they don’t seem puzzled at all. The answer given is something to the effect that, “I’m pointing at
the shovel and the chicken because you need the shovel to clean out the chicken
coop.” The mind is making up out of whole cloth a story to make sense of the
situation, the problem being that, that story has no relationship to the actual
reason the person was pointing at the two objects.

These facts are ignored for numerous reasons. They aren’t
what people want to believe so confirmation bias works against them. They are
incompatible with religious beliefs and there is a general discomfort about
where responsibility and accountability when personal choices are knowingly
coming from an unconscious level. Yet, while the reasons for our decisions and
the impulses seem to come from the unconscious level there has been some
clawing back of control with the findings of dFMC studies, where consciousness
seems to hold a veto power over the impulses that are presented to it.

Marcel Brass and Patrick Haggard had people make choices and
then watched them using an fMRI machine. Like in the previous tests the person
making the choice was to press a button, but this time the person could change
their mind after their initial decision. When the person changed their mind the
left dorsal frontomedian cortex (dFMC) was engaged. There is a correlation across
people between inhibition-related dFMC activation and the frequency of
inhibited actions, or as Michael Shermer simply puts it, “…the more you learn
to suppress your impulses, the better able you are to activate your dFMC to further
suppress future impulses.” Page 340 The Moral Arc.

Now given that the evidence shows that people are
unconscious in many of the motivations and that the mind is capable of
rationalizing after the fact it makes the retributive part of punishment almost
irrelevant, as the severity of the crime has to be as least partly mitigated by
the lack of conscious decision making behind any crime.

There is an example of this type of diminished capacity in
the case of sleepwalkers, as they are acting out and there mind has a great
deal of control, just these people lack the conscious awareness of what they
are doing.

Science has shown that we are all sleepwalking to some
extent, as are conscious thought is made up of rationalizations that differ
completely from the real reasons for a given action. This masking of reasoning
creates a situation of diminished control, not a complete lack as in the case
of sleepwalking, but enough so that punishing a person for the sake of
punishment doesn’t seem very just. The punishment should be an optimal balance
between the interests of society and the person being punished, not a judgement
to be anchored to the crime committed. Let the punishment fit the goals of
society and the offender! Well that doesn’t quite have the same simplicity and
ring to it, but big issues can rarely be simplified in such a way anyway.

This leads to the idea that all crime is mental illness, as
it is the programs of the mind creating poor choices, and an improper
functioning of the dFMC that failed to control those impulses that leads to
crime being committed. If the brain was working correctly and weighing the
choices correctly crime should not exist at all. This is assuming that laws and
punishments are created in such a way that it wouldn’t be worth the consequence
of the action. This is where severity of punishment can start to be linked back
with the potential gain of the crime committed, as it takes more
server/differing punishments to make different crimes not to be worth
attempting. As the potential of hours of community service should be sufficient
to stop small thefts but wouldn’t be sufficient to ward off largescale heists.

That’s the argument for a differing scale of punishment
based on deterrence, but the other three parts of justice also require specific
consequences for different actions. Rehabilitation should be interworked as a
science based medical approach that should be integrated with sentencing, especially
with so much crime involving drugs or diagnosable mental illness.
Incapacitation also ranges greatly for the type of offence as Louis Theroux
shows in A Place for Pedophiles.
Lastly, and most obvious is that the
amount of damage done by different crimes differs, and as it differs so should
the punishment for that crime.

This means than even in a completely deterministic system
where people have no control over their actions and no freewill there still has
to be punishment, as it is necessary not because the person is at fault, but
because punishment is required for laws to work. Not only does there have to be
punishment, but that punishment should be different based on society’s goals
for punishment and the goals of the offender. This does beg the question of the
necessity of laws, as I have presumed that they are necessary, but the
necessity of law is the subject for another post altogether.

It may have been noticed that twice I have referred to the goals
of society and offender, and the thought may come that only the goals of
society matter after a person has committed a crime. Let that thought die, as
when society becomes unfettered by the goals and respects of the individual
true atrocities can be and will be committed. Without taking into account the
goals of the individual, there would be no reasons at the level of the society
to not just purge those individuals that are hard to incapacitate, impossible
to deter, unable/unwilling to be rehabilitated, or lock into servitude those
who couldn’t repay their actions.

December 18, 2012

Well, I haven't posted in a while, but that will change, as I've written a few essays for different classes that I will post soon. I recently was listening to Point of Inquiry and Richard Wiseman mentioned how people would come up to him and ask him how to write better, and he just asked them, "Have you written anything today?" To become a better writer...write! That was his message, and even if Gladwell was wrong about 10,000 hours, it still takes time doing something to become good at it. Anyway onto the topic at hand, I was recently watching a presentation that first
started talking about self-interest, and it threw the term around with really
explaining what it meant, and in what sense he was using the term. More
specifically, was talking about two different types of self-interest without
ever distinguishing between the two different types.There is a rational self-interest in an
understanding of what would be the best for the individual in a given situation
(if there was a plate of cookies it would be best for me to take them all and
not share any) and a biological self-interest that isn’t a single calculation,
but one ran over numerous generations (trimethylamine oxide is produced in cells of the Greenland Shark that stop its cells from being broken apart by forming ice crystals). The presentation talked about the self-interest of bee's and compared it to self-interest in people, but never took the time to explain the distinction made above.This led
me to ask a question after the presentation, and I received a really strange
response.

The question in
question was, “There is a difference between biological self-interest that is
calculated over thousands of generations and a rational self-interest in what
you think would be best for yourself. People cannot make biologically
self-interested choices, as they don’t have access to what would be successful in
that way, so in what senses are what you talked about self-interested?”

The answer I received
was a strange one, “First, I disagree with your premise that people don’t make
biologically self-interested choices, and second I think that the poem on talks
more about biological self-interest.” Now this left me baffled, as it seemed
apparent that this person thought that to make a moral decisions (it was a
class is ethics) someone consciously weighted out all the evolutionary
advantages to doing something, and acted on what was best, or they innately
knew what was a good evolutionary decision and always acted on it.

The first way is easily
shown to be flawed because, 1) even if someone made a calculation there is no
way to be sure of what the future holds, so it necessarily has to be something
that is determined over time and never at a single instance and 2) there is no
way to way all the information needed to make the decision in the first place,
or even consistently weigh a small portion of that sample in a timely fashion
to make a quick decision.

The second way is also
just as deeply flawed, as Dawkins shows when he talks about society and biology
in The Selfish Gene when he points out the ‘unnaturalness’ of the desirable
welfare state. He explains that, “What has happened in modern civilized man is
that family sizes are no longer limited by the finite resources that the individual
parents can provide. If a husband and wife have more children than they can
feed, the state, which means the rest of the population, simply steps in and
keeps the surplus children alive and healthy. There is, in fact, nothing to
stop a couple with no material resources at all having and rearing precisely as
many children as the woman can physically bear. But the welfare state is a very
unnatural thing.”

This pretty much sums
it up, if people innately knew what was naturally best for them then they would
be acting in accordance with what Dawkins said and be completely abusing the
welfare state, until it became a version of the tragedy of the commons. There is a commonly understood ‘evolutionary
lag’ where evolution is always a step behind changes to the environment, as it
takes time to have the number of generations that adjust to it. Another phenomenon
is that evolution is limited to what is available in genetic positive genetic
changes, it can’t take backward steps meaning it can’t go in a different direction
that would be better in the long run, if it would cause decreased fitness for
an extended period. This means that even if evolution determined decision making
with no evolutionary lag, it still wouldn’t necessarily make evolutionarily
optimal decisions.

All this reminds me of J. B. S.
Haldane quote when asked if he would risk his life to save a drowning brother,
he responded, “No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.” I think
this quote alone is enough to point out the point out the absurdity of
evolution directly controlling moral decision making, as no one thinks in this
way and that’s why it’s funny. It doesn't have to micromanage each individual
decision, as it can instill general principles that are effective. This is
different than making evolution the decider of morality, and instead makes it create
a general framework.

Anyway,
people can make decisions that they view as in their self-interest and this may
or may not be in line with peoples biological self-interest, but if you’re
talking about what self-interest is, especially when jumping back and forth
between people and animals, it would be important to note the distinction.